Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) will supply treated water for construction projects in tankers from Wednesday. The Board has hired 26 water tankers each of 24,000 litres capacity for the purpose.
Amidst the water crisis, BWSSB banned the use of potable water (from borewells) for construction purposes and commandeered all borewells at construction sites, mandating them to use treated water. However, the initiative did not take off as builders complained that they neither have tankers nor found any on hire amidst the crisis and the transportation charges made using treated water unviable.
Following this, BWSSB partnered with Bangalore Apartments’ Federation (BAF) allowing them to sell 50% of treated water generated in their over 3,500 Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs), making sources of treated water spatially more distributed across the city. BWSSB has also announced that they will draw a pipeline of upto 500 metres from nearby apartments to construction sites to ensure reliable supply of treated water, even as they will supply treated water in tankers themselves within a radius of 5 km. These initiatives have driven the demand for treated water, sources in the BWSSB said.
Ram Prasath Manohar V., chairman, BWSSB, said the Board had got a demand for around 62 lakh litres (6.02 MLD) of treated water per day from the construction industry. “We will supply this treated water in tankers we have hired, where the distance between the source and the destination is less than 5 km. Builders will bear the transportation charges, apart from paying ₹10/kilolitre of treated water,” he said. “Earlier, the demand was as low as 60,000 litres which has now shot up a hundred times to over 60 lakh litres per day, which is a very good start. We expect to drive this demand to over 30 MLD in the next few months,” he said.
